Holy almost June! That means I’m on the cusp of wrapping up my sixth year of homeschooling! SIX YEARS! Most days I feel like I’m still getting my bearings, but here we are, plugging along and doing our very best. All in all, it has been a wonderful year.
If you’ve been around for awhile you’ve seen our two previous homeschool rooms:
There were two in between school spaces during other life transitions as well, but you all know what a basket and dining table look like :)
And now homeschool room #3! We rolled into our new home last August and I quickly unpacked our school boxes so we could get the year rolling. Thus, I’d consider this homeschool room “in progress” still.
Then again, the updates I have in mind aren’t really on our project radar so it might stay this way for awhile.
The room we designated as our homeschool room is technically a media room off the living room/kitchen/dining nook area. It has barn doors that are beautiful (and yet, are constantly almost smashing someone’s fingers) on one side and glass doors that lead out to the patio on the other side. Basically, it’s a pass through that took some finagling, but in the end it works pretty well.
The first thing you’ll probably notice is our lack of bookshelves. At least compared to the gorgeous shelves we had at our last house. We parted with lots of books and many (like 15 boxes!) are categorized and stored in the garage. It’s not ideal, but we’re making it work. I do love the bookshelf we purchased from Antiquology. It is sturdy and deep and HUGE. I suspect it will forever be part of our family.
The bottom shelf houses our current rotation of picture books. The next one up is a basket of each kiddo’s daily workbooks. A mix of resource books and unit studies are found on the top two.
My big splurge for this room was our egg chair. A year in and we still love it! Reid and I often snuggle up for his reading lesson there and the big kids use it on rotation for various studies. Our exact egg chair from Target isn’t available this season but Opalhouse released a variety of other colors and they’re just as lovely. Set up notifications and nab it on a sale if you’ve had your eye on one – it’s so cozy and fun! I actually just had an interaction with Target and the manufacturer’s customer service about a replacement piece (that was either missing or that I lost during assembly) and they were wonderful!
On the opposite side of the room we nudged a dresser for storage, our handy rolling cart, and a desk. This is where the “in progress” begins. I really want to paint the dresser a rich, dark green and add some handles. One of these days we will, I’m sure. I would undertake this project but this dresser was handmade by Dominic’s uncle and I don’t want to mess it up. I could definitely get it done, but Dom has a perfectionist’s eye that makes those sorts of projects turn out 10x better if I’m just patient and let him do it when it reaches the top of his project list.
The desk was a Facebook Marketplace find. Just $25! It’s solid and big! In its previous life it belonged to a teacher … in fact, “Allen” is written inside so we fondly call it Ms. Allen’s desk.
We studied states and capitals this year so Gathre’s USA map covered the wall outlet that was meant for a TV well. For reference, this is the Mini+ size. I’d love the World, National Parks, and even the Canada map someday. They’re so wonderful! I planned to put up other art work to the right of the map but mounting things into brick proved quite difficult.
I think that’s about it! A few other links in case you’re wondering …
- Rug from Lorena Canals, review here
- Pikler Triangle from Wood and Hearts, an Etsy shop based in the Ukraine that is wonderful and still shipping worldwide
- To Do List dry erase pockets, we use these for so many things
- Rolling Cart from Target, similar
- Metal chairs, four set from Amazon